Salman Latif is a software engineer with a specific interest in social media, big data and real-world solutions using the two.Other than that, he is a bit of a gypsy. He also writes in his own blog. You can find him on Google+ and Twitter .

Microsoft has revealed that Outlook.com has reached 400 million accounts ever since the July 2012 launch.

Micorosft’s Hotmail has been around for a long time. But over the years, the use and popularity of Hotmail diminished significantly. So the company recently re-branded the email service as Outlook.com, a move that seems to have paid off well. By now, the company claims that there are some 400 million Outlook.com accounts.

It has been less than a year since Microsoft decided to relaunch Hotmail as Outlook.com. The company made the switch back in July 2012 and since then, has been pushing Hotmail users to move to the sleek, redesigned Outlook email service, which offers many new features.

The company has now revealed that ever since it launched Outlook.com, some 400 million users have registered their accounts on it. What is even more interesting is that of this total user base, 125 million are mobile users. This essentially means that Microsoft is re-emerging as a significant player in the email service arena.

One of the key reasons why Microsoft has been able to pull this off is that the company shifts all your account data to Hotmail when you make the switch. While doing this, Microsoft claims that it transferred 150 petabytes of emails within six weeks of launching Outlook.com.

In an official blog post, Microsoft states, “This meant communicating with hundreds of millions of people, upgrading all their mailboxes–equaling more than 150 million gigabytes of data–and making sure that every person’s mail, calendar, contacts, folders, and personal preferences were preserved in the upgrade. Of course, this had to be done with a live site experience that was handling billions of transactions a day. With your help, we were able to do all of that in just about 6 weeks. We’ve spent the last few weeks ensuring that everything was completed in line with our high quality expectations.”

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